Kingston Fury Renegade G5 8TB NVMe SSD review

I think I’ve tested every controller and NAND flash combination found in all high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs at this point. At least everyone trying to make or break parity with Sandisk’s WD SN8100 drive, that is, everyone is pinching some drive technology in the process. However, this is the first SSD that I’ve managed to do this, but in a very strange, roundabout way.

The latest batch of Kingston Fury Renegade G5 drives, including the particularly loud 8TB unit we’re featuring here, tout the exact same NAND flash and controller combination found in the SN8100. But of course all dressed up in a Kingston skirt. And I’ll be candid, it works really, really well. That’s no surprise, considering this is the same hardware combination that catapulted the SN8100 onto our list of the best SSDs.

It’s well documented at this point how good this SSD is; nevertheless, we have yet to see it in 8TB capacity, which is exactly what Kingston is offering here. Maybe in the case of Sandisk, there’s no market demand for it, maybe tariffs are getting in the way, or maybe it’s been sidelined by the weird and wonderful breakup with WD, but Kingston has taken the same technology and turned it up to 11, increasing capacity, delivering in some areas and failing in others.

So unlike the Kioxia Exceria Plus G4, which had the same 218-layer BiCS8 TLC NAND but a different controller, or the Acer Predator GM9000, which had the same Silicon Motion SM2508 controller but a different NAND, the G5 undoubtedly has both as standard. Clone of the father SN8100. The driving force behind this drive is the 218-layer BiCS8 NAND memory – especially the density.

It was developed and designed by Kioxia and SanDisk, which have a long-standing joint venture in memory development and production. BiCS8 technology is impressive due to its increased vertical layer density (compared to BiCS6), allowing Sandisk and Kioxia to fit more arrays into a single 3D package.

This improves efficiency, performance, latency and maximum capacity, but is also impressive because the technology manages to enhance performance also in the side size, making the die surface even smaller.

This means you can effectively fit 4TB of high-performance NAND memory onto a single chip on a flash drive and stack two of them side by side, giving you 8TB to play with, without the need for a double-sided design. This gives the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 the unique advantage of compatibility with consoles and PCs, because despite such a ridiculous capacity and dedicated DRAM, it still only works on one side.

Don’t let marketing numbers fool you. Comparing this 218-layer NAND memory to Micron’s 276-layer TLC memory or Hynix’s 238-layer SK memory is not a fair comparison, and this also shows in performance, as both of these technologies when combined with the 8-channel SM2508 controller struggle to keep pace, especially when it comes to random performance at 4K resolution.

So let’s talk about the benchmark results. Sequential performance on the G5 is excellent. It actually beats the SN8100, delivering 14,830MB/s read and 14,136MB/s write. This is 100-200 MB/s more than SN8100. Similarly, the Crucial T710 (currently Phison and Micron’s flagship SSD) is unable to achieve speeds of just 14.1GB/s read and 13.2GB/s write.

Things get a bit more captivating with random 4K performance, however, where the G5 only manages 101MB/s read and 338MB/s write. This read is quite average for this drive and roughly comparable to the T710, although a far cry from the SN8100’s blazing 119MB/s read speed.

The massive difference, however, is the temperature, as despite its dual-pack configuration, the G5 manages to stay chilly at a noticeably chilly 63°C. For both the T710 at 70 and the SN8100 at 75, it is significantly higher.

This all translates into fantastic game load times, with Final Fantasy averaging 6.626 seconds. This is the second fastest drive I tested in this benchmark, although it’s worth remembering that FF XIV prefers to load larger capacity drives.

The G5 is really only held back in three areas. Firstly, 4K random read performance is a bit low compared to processors like the SN8100 (likely a conscious decision Kingston made for performance reasons, in the firmware to keep temperatures low and with wide compatibility), and secondly, well, availability. And the price.

At the time of writing there is little or no stock in US companies and in the UK you can only buy one for £1,000 at Scan. It’s not particularly value for money at £0.12 per GB, but it does provide better performance than other 8TB SSDs.

On paper, the G5 is phenomenal. It obliterates the benchmarks, thanks in huge part to its excellent combination of controller and NAND flash memory, and yet in the case of this particular figure, with its gigantic capacity and the price that follows it, we inevitably return to the same question.

Do you really need 8 TB on one drive? Or maybe something like 4TB or even 2TB would still be enough? You’ll still get the same hardware configuration, the same great performance, but at a much lower price.

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